Personal Jesus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9okF0_m1EQ
Personal Jesus, Depeche Mode
Most of us know this song. It was one of my favorites growing up and I still enjoy singing along to it while driving down the road. And what I have discovered over the years is that the lyrics describes the faith of so many, "Your own personal Jesus. Someone to hear your prayers. Someone who cares. "Many religious leaders will insist that the meaning and purpose of life is to have a personal relationship with the deity one worships. So what if the object of your worship does not present a physical presence on the earth. Or you can’t prove its existence? How does one have a personal relationship with someone or something you can't talk to, share a glass of wine with, or even email? It would seem that we need to do some fundamental reflection on the whole notion of having a "personal relationship. While, on the one hand, I respect the longing for the intimacy that these words reflect, they also concern me because they betray a creeping sort of secularization of our language about God. When people talk about having a personal relationship with God, the Force, or their personal truths as related to religion, we often make the association as if this relationship is the same as they might have with another human being. And as a result the language of the personal relationship is determined to cause all kinds of confusion. Primarily because no two people have the same experiences.
Marsha Witten cogently argues in her book, All is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism (Princeton, 1993), a close textual analysis of fifty-eight sermons on the parable of the prodigal son as found in Luke 15:11-32. Twenty-seven of the sermons were preached in mainline Presbyterian churches, and the rest to conservative Southern Baptists. In both traditions, Witten discovers, preachers respond to secularity by accommodating their language to it. Biblical language that emphasizes God's transcendence is replaced by language that emphasizes God's immanence. Jesus is not in heaven, at the right hand of God; he lives in our hearts. God is primarily seen as a "daddy," as sufferer on our behalf, and as extravagant lover. In these sermons the traditional language for God is accommodated to the human desire for connection and intimacy.
These sermons tend to lead the listener to believe that religion has little to offer beyond one's personal relationship to their God. But what does this mean? Well, it creates an illusion where the god that is made in the mind of the worshiper has human qualities. That doesn’t sound bad I guess; unless you think about it. During the process of the personal relationship and assigning human qualities to the Force, or God, one demotes the divine and universal to a secular entity that is on the same level of existence as us. We then expect things from it like granting our wishes, in the form of answering prayers, and assigning blame as if it is the Force that allows bad things to happen to good people. So instead of living up to the standards laid before us we drag our deity to our level and expect it to live to our standards. Makes me wonder who is God and who the worshipper is. But it is important to have a relationship with the Force. In fact, it is paramount. Many religions express themselves as a set of rules or ideologies to follow. And the individual comforts themselves with the notion of their personal relationship. And so we get to the meat of the sermon, choice. Faith is one of the most powerful tools a zealot wields. And where does this faith come from? Choice. If the Force came together in one place and solidified into a physical being to show you and prove its existence, where would be your choice but to believe? And then faith would be canceled out altogether. Choosing to believe when there is no proof is not foolishness. It is not naivety. It is faith. Having the so called personal relationship destroys faith. And the personal relationship is a trapping of the special individual mentality. The sixteen teaching and twenty-one maxims are not rules to live by or what is expected of us so much as they are descriptors of how we will experience the relationship with the Force once we submit to the relationship as it was intended to be. Not as we would have it to be. Jediism is not a set of rules to follow so that one achieves ultimate bad-ass-ness on their personal journey. It is a personal journey where the teachings help us to fulfill our relationship with the universe and the Force.
